“Daddy!!!” I heard Tyler yelling from his room in the middle of the night.
Realizing immediately that it wasn’t one of those run-of-the mill yells, I jumped out of bed and quickly appreciated what the problem was — the house was pitch black.
As I carefully felt my way into Tyler’s room, reassuring him that everything was ok, I looked out of the window to see if we were the only house effected. A sea of darkness told me this was not just us.
Now, a power outage wouldn’t have been that big a deal, except for the fact that the temperature was below freezing outside, and our heat doesn’t work when we don’t have power. Knowing how quickly this situation was about to go from bad to worse. I got on the phone to call PSE&G, our power company.
As an aside, while doing this, my wife was expressing severe annoyance at me disturbing her sleep, to which I calmly responded: “I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this situation — You are going to have frozen children in about two hours.”
“I have to get up for work in two hours,” she said, and rolled over.
So, with my betrothed firmly in my corner, I started making plans to save our family from imminent doom. Since PSE&G had no idea when we’d be back online, I decided to get the generator going, run some extension cords and, at the very least, power a space heater in our bedroom (where the whole family could congregate) and the refrigerator (so we didn’t lose everything in the freezer).
The plan became a bit less palatable when I moved toward operationalizing it. The generator, you see, is in the shed, and while it does have gas, it’s buried under a whole heaping helping of stuff, all of which would have to be moved in low light (if any) in the freezing cold. Oh, and another thing, those 100-foot heavy duty extension cords I bought for such an occasion — yeah, they’re still strewn about the yard where they last served to power Christmas lights. The thought of finding those in the dark was even less appealing than excavating the generator from its resting place.
As I went downstairs, still contemplating the mess I’d gotten us in with my poor planning, the cable box above our TV came to life, and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. We were back in business.
As I sit here now in Northern New Jersey, writing on Friday 1/22, we’re supposed to get a heck of a snowstorm tomorrow. Now, the issue isn’t really the snow, but the high winds, which are supposed to gust into the 40s and maybe even hit 50. With all our power lines running through the trees, and lots and lots of trees, there’s more than a 50 percent chance we’re going to lose power. And so I’ve got the warning I need to find and coil those extension cords, and I’ve got time to unearth the generator and give it a test.
But, of course, not every disaster comes with such a warning, much like the mini-one I described above. And so let my little incident be a lesson to you, and perhaps let it be the impetus for you to dust off your personal and professional disaster recovery and business continuity plans to make sure you not only know where they are, but where the things they require are too.
With so much else to do, preparing for the worst is often left to last, or never at all, but taking the time to actually do a run through once a while can mean the difference between getting through and getting buried.
PS: We got a foot and a half of snow, but didn’t lose power. ;-)
Aileen Katcher says
Great post as always Anthony. I suggest while folks are dusting off their disaster recovery plans, they also revisit their crisis communications plans.
jbormel says
Anthony, My friend Bob told me that he, too, was worried about frozen children. So he had an automatic, whole-home generator installed in his backyard, complete with newly buried power cables and gas lines. Shortly thereafter, the power company completed an upgrade project, resulting in no more power failures in his neighborhood. The generator has proven to be ornamental. He shared this story weeks AFTER we had our generator installed. Like you, we survived the storm without the power to our neighborhood going down. How much redundant backups are necessary? Apparently, it depends.